The mother of four must have agonised as the wall of flames swept through the heavily forested mountain toward her holiday home in southern Greece — should she flee the approaching fire or not? If she had stayed at home, neighbours say the family would have survived. Her single-storey house was virtually unscathed by the fires.
Fires tore through parched forests and swallowed villages across Greece, bearing down on villages near Ancient Olympia in the south a day after the government declared a nationwide state of emergency. More than 50 people were dead. ”We’re going to burn alive here,” one woman told Greek television from the village of Lambeti.
Navy divers early on Saturday searched the sunken wreckage of a cruise ship for the bodies of a Frenchman and his daughter who disappeared after the vessel foundered on a volcanic reef — the only two people missing despite what passengers described as a chaotic evacuation in the Aegean Sea.